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mental health
'Incomprehensible': Trump Admin To Shut Down LGBTQ+ Suicide Hotline
"This is devastating, to say the least," said one critic of the White House decision to dismantle a program that has served nearly 1.3 million young people in recent years. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics."
Jun 19, 2025
In the midst of Pride Month, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced that it will shut down the national suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.
Since 2022, the National Suicide Hotline, accessible by dialing 988, allowed users to "press 3" to speak with counselors trained to support LGBTQ+ youth.
According to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization that was contracted to run the hotline, LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers and 41% of them seriously considered suicide in the past year. Now, the service that is meant to help them will be shut down on July 17.
A statement released Tuesday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that the hotline "will no longer silo LGB+ youth services," using a hateful and discriminatory abbreviation that excludes transgender and queer individuals, which has become standard for the Trump administration. SAMHSA insisted that it would continue "serving all help seekers, including those" who used the LGBTQ+ hotline.
However, as Adrian Shanker, a senior advisor to the Biden administration on issues related to gender and sexual identity, told Mother Jones, the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention service was created to deal with the exceptionally high influx of calls from people in that community and designed to meet their specific needs. According to SAMHSA data, the hotline has served nearly 1.3 million callers since its creation in 2022.
"This is not about politics. It's not about the political divide on transgender medicine or trans people in the military, or any of the other hot-button political topics," Shanker said. "This is about suicide prevention and crisis intervention for people living at a higher rate of suicide risk."
The legislation that added special counseling for high-risk populations, including LGBTQ+ youth, was signed by President Trump in 2020. But since its passage, far-right attacks on sexual and gender minorities have become a core part of the Republican platform and the second Trump administration.
Since taking office, the administration has introduced measures that seek to erase transgender people from public life. These have included barring people from identifying as their preferred gender on federal documents, stripping the funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, and erasing the history of transgender Americans from government websites. They have described these efforts as part of a crusade to eliminate "radical gender ideology."
In their efforts to shut down the suicide prevention program, members of the administration have invoked age-old stereotypes accusing gay and trans people of abusing vulnerable youth.
Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, told NBC News last week that it defended efforts to defund the suicide hotline because "children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by 'counselors' without consent or knowledge of their parents." Another unnamed senior administration official described the organizations who provided this mental health care to vulnerable youth as "radical grooming contractors."
Ironically, rising bigotry has been one of the driving forces of the LGBTQ+ suicide epidemic. A study published by Nature Human Behavior and the Trevor Project last year found that in states that enacted anti-trans laws, the rate of suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary teenagers increased from 7% to 72%.
"This is devastating, to say the least," Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a Wednesday statement about the closure of the suicide hotline. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible."
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Born Loser: On Donald Trump's Troubled Life
Trump grew up in a world of vast privilege, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't emotionally wounded. Now, once again, the world pays the price for this deeply damaged man.
Jun 14, 2025
I must admit, if Trump wasn't such a power-hungry demagogue, a danger to democracy, a sexual predator, racist, sociopath, pathological liar, bully, and impulsive and unstable megalomaniac, I might feel sorry for him.
He has no real friends, just sycophants. All his relationships are transactions, including with his three wives and his children. When people are no longer useful to him—wives, lawyers, advisors, Cabinet members—he discards them.
His current wife Melania is transactional, too. She married him for his money. She obviously doesn't love or respect him and she occasionally displays her disdain for him in public. She didn’t even campaign for him last year, except to make a few public appearances.
Trump hardly ever laughs. He has an almost-constant angry scowl on his face. To Trump, the world is a dark and foreboding place, where, like him, people are consumed by greed and lust. He relies on money and intimidation to get what he wants because he has no capacity for empathy or love—or any belief that people can be motivated by idealism and compassion.
Trump grew up in a world of vast privilege, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't emotionally wounded.
Both the federal raids on immigrants in Los Angeles and the upcoming military parade in Washington, D.C. reflect Trump’s need to look tough, manly, and in control.
According to his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, he was bullied by his father, who must have told Donald that he wasn't smart and that he was (or should be worried about being) a loser. In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, warning that he was erratic and unstable as pressures mounted on him. Two years later, they updated the book—this time with 37 experts weighing in on Trump’s troubled mental health.
He has no strong beliefs about governing or public policy. His major motivations are money, power, revenge, racism, and adulation.
One of Trump’s few joys in life are the cheers from his fans at MAGA rallies. So, to compensate for his insecurities, feed his ego, and to mobilize his MAGA followers, he has planned this massive parade on June 14—today—ostensibly to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, but which also just happens to coincide with this 79th birthday. The plan is to include 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, and seven military bands, and 34 horses—at a cost of about $50 million—money that could otherwise be spent on improving the lives of soldiers and military veterans. The event will require the closure of Ronald Reagan National Airport to accommodate flyovers and fireworks displays. Trump intends it as a display of force, domination, and personal power. It is more about him than about honoring our soldiers and veterans.
In U.S. history, large military parades have typically come at the end of wars as part of demobilizing troops and celebrating getting the country back to normal. But such spectacles have a long tradition in authoritarian countries, where dictators, including the current rulers of Russian and North Korea, seek to bind themselves to national identity. The most disreputable of these displays of dominance were the mass rallies and parades organized by the Nazis to celebrate Adolf Hitler, depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s pathbreaking propaganda film “Triumph of the Will,” that celebrated Hitler speaking at a massive Nazi Party rally in Nurenberg in 1934.
Having won a second term, Trump is now wants to consolidate his grip on power. He’s sought to bend those whom he views as his critics and opponents—universities, media companies, law firms, judges, businesses, scientists, artists and performers, and even professional sports teams—to his will. Both the federal raids on immigrants in Los Angeles and the upcoming military parade in Washington, D.C. reflect Trump’s need to look tough, manly, and in control.
From his father, who was arrested at a Klan rally in 1927, he also absorbed the racist ideas of the fake science of eugenics, which was popular in America in the early 1900s.
In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune. In 2010, he told CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse.” He compared his own “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds. During a 2020 campaign speech to a crowd of white supporters in Minnesota, Trump said, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
But in fact, Trump has thus always been insecure about his family's genes. His father lied about his family's heritage, pretending that the Trumps were from Swedish, not German, ancestry. Trump repeated the lie in his book, The Art of the Deal. (He later said that he wouldn't mind if the US had more immigrants from Scandinavia, but kept out immigrants from "shithole countries," an outrageously racist comment). Trump said at a rally in Iowa that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of the country. They're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out."
Trump believes that most white Americans share his racism toward immigrants and that he can weaponize that hatred by carrying out a mass deportation of people he calls “illegal” and “criminals.” He’s sent federal agents to Los Angeles to arrest immigrant workers and parents, followed by National Guard troops to intimidate and arrest those who are protesting the anti-immigrant raids. This is all designed to create fear and chaos to give Trump cover as the “law and order” president and, as Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA) noted, “an excuse to declare martial law in California.” The timing is no accident. The federal raids—which Trump is likely to expand to other cities—are meant to divert public attention from Trump’s legislative plan to cut Medicaid and other essential programs in order to give a huge tax cut to the super-rich.
Trump often claims that he's a self-made billionaire. In fact, he inherited his father's wealth, as reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig explain in their 2024 book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. His father bankrolled his developments and bailed him out when they failed. Despite his boasts, he knows that most of his business ventures—his casinos, hotels, golf courses, fake university, airline, football team, clothing line, steaks, and others—failed. Most banks won't go near Trump, because they consider him a toxic grifter who consistently defrauds his subcontractors, employees, and lenders. According to Forbes magazine—which ranks the world’s billionaires—Trump was never as wealthy as he claimed to be.
The timing is no accident. The federal raids—which Trump is likely to expand to other cities—are meant to divert public attention from Trump’s legislative plan to cut Medicaid and other essential programs in order to give a huge tax cut to the super-rich.
Trump's favorite insults, directed toward people he considers his enemies, are "not smart" and "losers." Clearly the man is projecting.
Trump was terrified of losing last year’s election because he might have had to go to prison and also because he'd be viewed as a "loser," which in his mind is the worst thing you can be, a consequence of his father's disparagement and his mother's neglect. He was doubly worried that he might lose to a Black woman, Kamala Harris, whom he described as “not smart.”
Trump is clearly insecure about his mental abilities and worries that it's due to his inferior genes. He’s boasted that he comes from a superior genetic stock and that he is a "very stable genius." For years, he has constantly insisted that "I'm smart." “Throughout my life,” Trump tweeted in 2018, “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” He lied about being first in his class in college. He didn't even make the Dean's List. Whenever he has defended his intelligence, it isn't clear if he's trying to convince his interviewers or himself.
He’s even defensive about his vocabulary. He claims to have "great words," although linguists who have studied his speeches and other statements say he has the vocabulary of an adolescent. He doesn't read—for pleasure or work. As president, he doesn’t read the memos prepared for him by his staff, including intelligence briefs. Some observers attributed this to his arrogance. But more likely it is because he can’t understand what is in them. He'd rather be considered arrogant than stupid.
At least 26 of his top aides publicly said that Trump was unfit to be president. They questioned his competence, character, impulsiveness, narcissism, judgement, intelligence, and even his sanity.
According to Michael Wolff, in his book, Fire and Fury, both former chief of staff Reince Priebus and ex-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called Trump an “idiot.” Trump’s one-time economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump was “dumb as shit.” His national security adviser H.R. McMaster described the president as a “dope.” In July 2017, news stories reported that Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, called the president a “moron.” When asked, he did not deny using that term. In an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Tillerson recounted that Trump’s “understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.” He said, “It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”
“Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” said his former Vice President, Mike Pence. Mark Esper, one of Trump’s Defense Secretaries, said that Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first, and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.” In his farewell speech, Mark Milley, a retired Army general who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2023, warned “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” clearly referring to Trump. John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps four-star general who served as chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, said that Trump “admires autocrats and murderous dictators” and “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
Soon after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, McMaster, the former national security advisor, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had incited the riot through “sustained disinformation… spreading these unfounded conspiracy theories.” He accused Trump of “undermining rule of law.” Sarah Matthews, deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, witnessed Trump staffers trying, without success, to get the president to condemn the January 6 violence. “In my eyes, it was a complete dereliction of duty that he did not uphold his oath of office,” she told USA Today. “I lost all faith in him that day” and resigned from her job. Trump’s “continuation of pushing this lie that the election is stolen has made him wholly unfit to hold office every again,” Matthews said.
What kind of president invites the media to attend Cabinet meetings where each member is required to humiliate themselves by telling Trump how wonderful he is?
But let's give Trump some credit. He does have the kind of intelligence, sometimes called "street smarts," attributed to hustlers, con men, and grifters. That seems to have worked for him.
Trump knows that many Republicans in Congress laugh at him behind his back but don't say anything in public because they fear him—particularly his ability to find candidates to run against them in the GOP primaries.
He also knows that most world leaders don't respect him. We’ve now been witness to the ritualized Oval Office meetings between Trump and his counterparts, where Trump seeks to bully, coerce, and humiliate them. A few have challenged him, which gets him angry enough to seek revenge. His meetings with Putin are somewhat different, since he envies the Russian autocrat’s power. Trump’s bromance and recent break-up with Elon Musk is partly about policy but mostly a battle of egos and wills.
What kind of person craves being famous for telling people, "You're fired"? But that's how he became a TV celebrity. What kind of president invites the media to attend Cabinet meetings where each member is required to humiliate themselves by telling Trump how wonderful he is? To Trump, respect is a zero-sum game. He likes to demean others to boost himself.
Trump will try, and fail, to cancel the 2028 elections and remain in power. But don't expect him to fade away. He will seek to become the leader of a white nationalist supremacist movement while continuing to dominate the Republican Party. The MAGA forces he’s unleashed since 2016 will also still be around. It is no accident that racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic incidents have spiked since Trump began campaigning for president. Trump verbalizes, encourages, enables, tolerates, winks at, and makes excuses for hate groups, most notably when he said that some of the Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 were “good people.”
WhenTrump dies from the side effects of obesity, the nation and the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
But as he gets crazier and crazier, and no longer has the power of the presidency, most of his followers will abandon him, crowds at his rallies will be smaller and smaller, and he’ll become a lonely, decrepit old man, a fallen idol like the Orson Welles character (Charles Kane) in the 1941 film "Citizen Kane" and the Andy Griffith character (Lonesome Rhodes) in the 1957 film "A Face in the Crowd."
He'll retreat to Mar-a-Lago—his Xanadu—by himself and with his paid staff. Or perhaps he'll spend much of his remaining years in federal prison, seething over how he was the victim of conspiracies.
WhenTrump dies from the side effects of obesity, the nation and the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief. And while he can't quite admit it to himself, he knows it, and it terrifies him.
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Why Does the US Press Ignore the Trauma Experienced by Palestinians in Gaza? Racism
Because we don’t see Palestinians as fully human, we fail to understand how destroying their lives, denying them a normal present and a hopeful future can result in deformities in their sense of self.
May 27, 2025
One thing of which we can be certain is that there will be consequences to the genocide in Gaza.
It is difficult to wrap one’s arms around the excruciating pain being endured by Palestinians in Gaza. We only know the rough outline of the devastation. Tens of thousands have been murdered in aerial bombardments, over 100,000 have sustained serious injuries, the majority of homes have been demolished, and, as a result of Israel’s blockade, mass starvation is impacting more than one and one-half million people. In addition, hospitals and schools have been destroyed, and other essential services to provide support for births, illnesses, deaths and grieving, and treatment of the psychological wounds of war have been largely terminated.
We know that most of the dead and wounded are civilians, with the majority being women and children. We also know that upwards of 4,000 people have lost limbs. And many wounded children are the only survivors in their families, making them maimed orphans without a support network.
If we don’t demonstrate compassion and implement a comprehensive approach to rebuilding Gaza and restoring a sense of wholeness to its people, I fear what the future may have in store.
I’ve written before about the indecency of those “day after” discussions that focus exclusively on matters of governance or bricks-and-mortar while ignoring the human dimension and long-term consequences of this conflict. Of course, those governing and reconstruction issues are important, and it is gratifying that working papers are being developed to address them. But building housing and infrastructure and creating administrative structures should not be the sole considerations; attention must also be paid to addressing and healing the physical and psychological wounds of this war.
Consider the psychic wounds experienced by Gaza’s children. We know that significant losses produce trauma. Losing a parent, a sibling, or a friend, or even just moving to a new neighborhood can be unsettling and have an impact on behavior or mental stability. We also know that the degree of the shock can be mitigated by other factors. For example: the discomfort experienced by a child when their family moves to a new city and the child loses friends and a familiar environment can be somewhat offset by a supportive family.
But what if, as is the case in Gaza, your family has lost many loved ones (parents, children, and close extended family members), been forced to move multiple times, and is now living in a tent without food or water? And then imagine that during the last cease-fire, children, already traumatized by loss, joined the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians making the long trek northward to their old homes. What they find upon arrival is that not only their home but also their entire neighborhood is rubble and unrecognizable. And then they are forced to deal with hunger and the indignity of witnessing their parents begging for food.
We know that as we grow our brains organize our experiences so that they sense to us. We develop a mental map of our relationships and our place in the world in which we live. But what if, in the case of a 12-year-old returning to Gaza City, they find that there is no home, and the way to school, the neighborhood store, a friend’s home, or the mosque or school have all have been erased. The compounding of multiple losses and extreme dislocation can only be seen as profoundly traumatizing. Under these circumstances it is impossible to calculate the severity of the impact on this child’s well-being or future development. What will become of them, their older siblings, and their parents? How will their brains ingest and make sense of all of these losses?
Given the seriousness of this situation, it becomes imperative not only to end the conflict and make plans for reconstruction and governance, but also to create strategies to address psychic and developmental needs as well. The U.S. press focuses on the need to address the trauma of those young Israelis who’ve been held hostage in Gaza. This is obviously needed, but what is disturbing is the extent to which we’ve ignored the trauma experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. Why? In a word, racism.
Because we don’t see Palestinians as fully human, we fail to understand how destroying their lives, denying them a normal present and a hopeful future can result in deformities in their sense of self. If we don’t demonstrate compassion and implement a comprehensive approach to rebuilding Gaza and restoring a sense of wholeness to its people, I fear what the future may have in store.
Even now, neither Israel nor the U.S. have shown any interest in addressing the humanity of Palestinians and instead are advancing plans that see this much beleaguered people reduced to pawns to be moved about to help Israel achieve its goals.
The solution must come from a forceful and united stand taken by Arabs and key European states to sanction Israel for its crimes, force them to evacuate Gaza, and end their occupation of Palestinian lands. Then and only then, under an international mandate, can reconstruction begin that will rebuild Gaza and help to heal the wounds of the Palestinian victims of this war.
If we do not take this course, there will be hell to pay as the bitter seeds being planted today will be bearing fruit in future generations.
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